Deerfield business makes professional telescopes

Monday

Nov 18, 2013 at 4:00 PM

By John MulcahyDaily Telegram Staff Writer

Kevin Iott’s business is looking to the stars, literally.

Iott is president of Meridian Mechatronics, a machining business in Deerfield where he also is a partner with PlaneWave Instruments, a California-based company that designs, manufactures and sells professional astronomy equipment.

Meridian buys the materials and does the machining and manufacturing of all the components for PlaneWave’s telescopes, as well as some assembly. Iott does the mechanical engineering and electrical design for the telescopes in Deerfield. Most of the assembly takes place in California, as does the optics work, such as polishing and finishing the lenses.

PlaneWave’s telescopes are sold to science centers, colleges, universities and government contractors such as Boeing and Lockheed Martin, Iott said. Some have been used in NASA projects.

The telescopes range in price from about $12,000 to about $250,000, Iott said.

“When I tell people what our product is, they are very surprised,” he said.

Measured by the size of the aperture of their primary mirror, PlaneWave’s telescopes range in size from 121⁄2 inches to 28 inches. A 28-inch version, on its mount and pointed upward, is about 9 feet tall and weighs 1,200 pounds.

That telescope has a 6.5 focal ratio, which gives it a circular field of view of almost 1 degree of the sky, Iott said. From horizon to horizon, the sky is 180 degrees.

About half of PlaneWave's customers are private individuals, though some are doing advanced astronomy, Iott said.

Recently, the company shipped its largest telescope to Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com, and Iott expects to go to Texas in the near future to install the telescope at Bezos’ home there.

Iott, 28, who lives in Petersburg, started his company about four years ago after getting laid off from a machining job. He started building telescope mounts in his garage and, while buying accessories from a California company, heard about PlaneWave.

Iott called PlaneWave and they invited him to display some of his mounts at their exhibit at an astronomy show in New York in April 2009, Iott said. That led to his partnership with them, he said.

“They were farming out, basically, a half million dollars a year in machining,” he said.

PlaneWave decided to bring its machining in-house, and Iott founded Meridian for that purpose. Iott started Meridian in Britton and moved the company to a former bowling alley in Deerfield in January of this year.

He and his wife, Laura, who have four daughters, ages 1 to 8, moved to California for a year but decided it wasn’t for them and returned to Michigan in May 2012, Iott said. While he was gone, his brother oversaw the business in Britton.

Meridian’s business has grown 40 percent to 50 percent every year since he started it, Iott said. PlaneWave has grown 40 percent evey year since he entered a partnership with it, he said.

In Deerfield, Meridian employs seven people and PlaneWave employs two, he said.

Meridian’s machining operations are highly computerized, but his workers still must be skilled, Iott said.

“The guys still have to have a lot of experience,” he said.

A journeyman toolmaker, Iott said he got interested in astronomy when he was in fifth grade and went to an astronomy camp in Jackson. He built his first computerized telescope mount in a high school machining class.

His business has opened up opportunities he would not otherwise have had, Iott said. Besides travel in the U.S., he has traveled to Germany, Poland and Australia on business.

“We have telescopes all over the world,” Iott said.

He also has met such notables as the director of NASA and English business magnate and investor Richard Branson.

For the future, PlaneWave has a lot of large projects with universities and is starting to do more work with the Department of Defense, Iott said. The company also is developing a 1-meter diameter telescope that will be built in Deerfield, Iott said.

He remains an amateur astronomer with a telescope at home with which he likes to look at nebulae and star clusters, but he is actually more passionate about the equipment itself, Iott said.